1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to arrangements and methods suitable for use in magnetic recording, test and measurement equipment and other purposes, employing concentrated stray magnetic fields.
2. Description of the Prior Art
During recent years there has been a continuous drive towards higher storage capacity and correspondingly faster data transfer rates. For magnetic storage devices the path to higher storage density per area is through the development of media with increasingly smaller magnetic grains.
Attempting to merely scale down mechanical dimensions, however, results in operations closer to thermal instability of the magnetization, known as the “Superparamagnetic Limit”.
Changing to grains made of materials that have higher crystalline magnetic anisotropy moves this limit. This suggests the use of higher magnetic coercivity materials, which are readily available. The challenge is to create a strong enough magnetic field with a high enough field gradient to write a high-density signal on such a medium.
Magnetic tapes and disks operate with longitudinal recording, which means that the written magnetic units are organized along the surface in the direction of the movement of the medium.
The write field must then be a stray magnetic field, which has a longitudinal component. The maximum achievable write field for a given pole geometry is limited by the saturation magnetization of the pole material. Advances over the past years in designing high moment pole materials seem to stagnate at a Bs around 25 kG. Therefore tape with coercivity higher than about 3 kOe cannot be properly utilized. For hard disk drives the limit is somewhat higher, due to their higher linear density, thinner recording layer and shorter head to media spacing.
The magnetic field inside the gap itself can easily be made more than 10 times stronger, but to utilize that field the medium must be inside the gap. This is done by the so-called SPT, Single Pole Type head (also referred to as a monopole head). A “gap” is formed between the write pole and a high permeability soft magnetic under-layer (SUL) in the media that carries the flux back to the return pole of the head. Impeding the progress of this technology has been noise from the SUL.
For these reasons the strong increase in storage density per area for hard disks over the recent years has slowed down somewhat. This is a clear drawback in the ongoing competition with other storage technologies.
Much research is devoted to finding means of creating the very strong fields required for writing high coercivity media.
A planar type of write head with specific pole tip geometry for providing extremely strong magnetic fields has been suggested in K. S. Kim et al., IEEE Trans. Magn., Vol. 38, NO 5 September 2002, pp. 2213-2215 and Yasushi Kanai et al., IEEE Trans. Magn., Vol. 38, NO. 5 September 2002, pp. 2210-2212 The only available data on such designs to date are based on simulations. These show that a very high power is required; in excess of 0.4 ampere-turns to write on 8 kOe media. A further drawback of such designs is thought to be the manufacturability of the high quality write gaps needed.
Another suggested solution of this problem is heat, i.e. thermal (or optical) assistance to decrease the coercivity of the storage medium during the recording process. Several techniques have been suggested for this approach, namely Kryder M. N., Review of non-conventional recording: Approaches to 100 Gbit/in2, The Magnetic Recording Conference, Minneapolis, Minn., 1993, Nemoto H. et al., J. Magn. Soc. Jpn., Vol. 23, Supplement No. S1, p. 229 (1999), Katayama H. et al., J. Magn. Soc. Jpn., Vol. 23, Supplement No. S1, p. 233 (1999) and Ruigrok, J. J. et al. J. Appl. Phys., 87, p. 5398 (2000). All these techniques have important disadvantages: The heating of adjacent tracks during the recording process, the requirement of a very sharp temperature gradient (especially with media with metallic substrates), as well as the use of two different kinds of energy sources for recording, adding complexity to the system.